Philip Roth made headlines a year and a half ago with the announcement that he had stopped writing fiction. Now he is also giving up reading it — out loud and in public, at least. Mr. Roth, 81, declared his renunciation on Thursday at a private reception following his sold-out reading at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. “You can write it down: This was absolutely the last appearance I will make on any public stage, anywhere,” Mr. Roth told a reporter before turning back to the stream of friends and admirers lined up to greet him. It remains to be seen how much wiggle room there is in Mr. Roth’s resolve. Next week, he’s set to receive the Yaddo Artist’s Medal at a banquet in New York. And woe to anyone who put money on his vow, after a contentious appearance at Yeshiva University in 1962, that he would “never write about Jews again.” But his agent, Andrew Wylie, said he was indeed pushing the microphone aside for good. “I’m sure Philip meant what he said,” Mr. Wylie said in an email. “You should take him at his word.” He added in a second email, in emphatic capital letters: “It was absolutely his last appearance on any stage anywhere.” Even before that announcement, Mr. Roth’s visit to the Y’s wood-paneled auditorium, ringed with names like Maimonides and Shakespeare, was indisputably rare. His last reading there was in 1993, a few days after his 60th birthday. (“Let’s do it again when I’m 70,” Mr. Roth later wrote to Karl Kirchwey, then the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the Y. “I’ll bet we get the same audience. But, please, not the same hors d’euvres [sic]. But then by 2003 maybe I’ll be able to spell it!”) The reading on Thursday — a double bill with Claudia Roth Pierpont (not a relative), author of the critical study “Roth Unbound” — had been scheduled for October but then postponed, prompting what Bernard Schwartz, now the Unterberg director, called “no small amount of Jewish superstition” about whether Mr. Roth would ever show up. “We’ve had six months to perfect our pronunciation of ‘kenahora,’ ” a Yiddish expression used to ward off the evil eye, Mr. Schwartz said in his opening remarks. “We’ve gotten calls of concern: Is he really going to be here? But I can assure you he’s here.” Ms. Pierpont appeared first, with the talk “The Women in Philip Roth’s Fiction,” a response to the charges of misogyny that have long been brought against his work. She also touched on what she said were two other neglected Rothian themes: music and silverware. (The dinner party in “American Pastoral,” in which Swede Levov’s father is nearly stabbed in the eye with a fork, she said, may be the most memorable fork moment in literature since Esther discovered the curtain in her new room held up with one in Dickens’s “Bleak House.”) After an introduction by the novelist Nicole Krauss, Mr. Roth took the stage in a sharp black suit over an open-necked black shirt and sat behind an ornately carved wooden table, under theatrical lighting that brought to mind “Krapp’s Last Tape” more than it did a lecture hall. He read two long passages from “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995). Ms. Pierpont had paid tribute to the novel’s fantastically dirty middle-aged sex, but Mr. Roth kept things clean. In between the passages, he offered comments on Mickey Sabbath, the book’s raucous and anarchic puppeteer hero, drawn partly from a recently published interview. “I could have called the book ‘Death and the Art of Dying,’ ” he said. Sabbath, he added, is “pursued by death,” but “followed everywhere by laughter.” The auditorium was filled with a general aura of entrancement, punctuated by laughter at lines like “He had never found a goy yet who could talk fast enough for him.” (Mr. Roth read rather slowly, seemingly registering each sentence on his face.) Afterward, one man commented on his “oddly gentle” manner. Another man, close to Mr. Roth’s age, observed that the author had given little away. “You read his books; you think he knows you,” he said. “But who’s this guy? He ain’t telling.”